We are entering the age of automation heralded by AI. There is imminent danger that humans will become redundant and Universal Basic Income has been proposed as a solution. How correct is the doomsday prophets and how good is the solution?

There is a growing tread of companies adopting the microservices architecture to solve their scaling needs. I have worked with SOA or microservices for many years and here are some of my thoughts about advantages and disadvantages of such a system.

If you have been ever curious about why Bayes Theorem is so important to not just Mathematics but all of Science, here is a an intuitive explanation of Bayes’ Theorem and why it covers even the scientific method itself as a special case.

In this article, I present a summary of the main points of the above article.

A significant part of a developer’s work is to read code written by others (or even code written by yourself whose memories have somewhat faded). Reading code is a skill and there are techniques using which you can improve your ability to read and understand code faster.

He quotes a proverb “If the pot is empty, what will come in the ladle?”

As he says, IT is mainly an enabling technology, one used to increase the efficiency of a system. But, if our pot is empty, what use is increasing the size of the
laddle. He lists several areas for innovators to work on: 1) Solar panels and energy efficient appliances like chulhas, 2) Healthcare research to develop newer vaccines, diagnostics and drugs to treat diseases, especially those effecting India and 3) agricultural research to increase productivity.

Back in 1970’s, DARPA’s director at the time, George H. Heilmeier developed a set of questions for new projects to answer in order to get funding. He himself called them “Heilmeier Catechism”. They are still valid today for investors, funders and for yourself to check if something is worth investing your money and time in.

The original style is not the style which never borrows of any one, but that which no other person is capable of reproducing. — François-René de Chateaubriand

JUN 14, 2015

If you are curious about how a scientist thinks about his work, Prof. Sean Caroll of Caltech summarizes very nicely the work of a theoretical physicist and gives the justification about why they should write popular science books along with research papers.

MAY 29, 2015

chance is irrelevant in the real world – things happen for reasons, not chance.
Often we cannot know the reasons and we use chance as a surrogate, but to ask “what are the chances…?” is to set up a strawman.